I Die, But My Memory Lives On

The World AIDS Crisis and the Memory Book Project

Henning Mankell

Translated by Laurie Thompson
Foreword by Archbishop Desmond Tutu
Afterword by Samuel Worthington of Plan USA

hardcover

$14.95

Henning Mankell, internationally famous creator of the bestselling Kurt Wallander mysteries, here offers a nonfiction fable about a heartrending tradition spawned by a major health crisis: the invaluable Memory Book Project, which gives those dying of AIDS an opportunity to record their lives in words and pictures for the children they leave behind. 

In Uganda, Mankell finds village after village populated only by children and the elderly—those left behind after AIDS swept away an entire generation. These slim, intensely personal volumes can contain words, pictures, a pressed butterfly, or even grains of sand as ways to represent the lives lost to this devastating plague. Excerpts from Ugandan memory books appear throughout I Die, but the Memory Lives On and, together with Mankell’s narrative, they tell stories of individual lives while sounding a powerful warning about the threat of AIDS.

Featuring a foreword by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the book includes an appendix listing AIDS organizations and resources. A portion of the book’s proceeds with be donated to AIDS charities in Africa.

Henning Mankell has written thirty-five novels and many plays. Published in thirty-five countries with over 25 million copies in print worldwide, his books consistently top the bestseller lists in Europe. Mankell divides his time between Sweden and Maputo, Mozambique, where he has been working as a director at Teatro Avenida since 1985. Based in Warwick, Rhode Island, Plan USA is an organization committed to helping children, their families, and communities in forty-five developing countries around the world.